List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

1. Shut Up and Let Me Go - The Ting Tings. Yes, it’s from an iPod commercial. I have no shame. Every once in a while, I get stuck on a song and have to listen to it until I completely burn out on it. I love the part in the middle when it breaks down and it’s just tom toms and a synth with an envelope filter. I suppose it’s Franz Ferdinand meets The White Stripes.
2. In the Waiting Line - Zero 7. I come back to this one all the time. Mellow.
3. Ain’t No Reason - Brett Dennen. Love his accent.
4. Water in the Fuel - Fred Eaglesmith. I love songs that paint pictures. If/when I get back to playing out, I want to play this one - simple and powerful. Reminds me of the old-school country music I listened to growing up (Waylon, Willie, Dolly, Emmylou). Some wonderful, now lost, internet person sent me a live Kasey Chambers CD and she covered this. It was just about pull-the-car-over good.
5. Angel - Jack Johnson. From his new one - Sleep Through the Static. Short, sweet, romantic. I like Jack Johnson because there’s really no pretense. WYSIWYG music. Chris and I took the kids to see him a couple weeks ago and had a good time, even with staggeringly drunk girl deciding to (literally) crash on our blanket with us. Ian: “Daddy, why did that girl just lay down here?” Me: “She’s just very, very tired Ian.”
6. I’m Yours - Jason Mraz. White guys doing reggae with clever lyrics. Works for me every time. See also: 311, The Police, Snow. Reggae (white, black, or otherwise) just pushes my buttons.
7. Last Request - Paolo Nutini. Is he not just crazy sexy? I wouldn’t throw him out of bed unless he was better on the floor. And here he is begging for just one more roll in the hay. Twist my arm.

I guess it’s a spring full of mostly boy-music. I tend to oscillate between big batches of female singer/songwriters and big batches of male singer/songwriters. With a bit of electronica thrown in for good measure.

Tagging: Fuzzy - browsing his Last.fm recently played list is like archeology research, Jessica - bound to be something inspirational, Tammy - because I have no idea what she listens to, Sam - for some oldies fun.

I miss writing here at AFGM. Several things have come between me and writing lately, some by choice, some most definitely against my will.

Primarily, the time I used to spend writing (after kids are in bed) is now spent talking on the phone to Christine. How are things going with my sweet Mariposa? Splendidly. While we have a comfortable rhythm to our lives now - me visiting her once or twice a week and she visiting me/us twice or more a week - I still get excited when I pull up to her house on Wednesday evening for date night. She’s affectionate and nurturing to my kids, but still makes it clear to them and to me that I’m the parent and will be regardless of what commitment we may end up making. Her love for me is unflinching - it’s easy for her to see the good in me even when I may not be flying it out on a flag on my front porch. Our interests are delightfully similar. Music, gardening, the outdoors, racquetball, running, food. Our tastes are similar. We’ll walk through Pottery Barn and find ourselves attracted to the same items. Her house decoration, her clothing choices, her sense of humor - all of them seem completely normal to me. As I’ve said before, we’re from the same tribe. I’m doing a minor remodel of my kitchen. She’s doing a medium-scale remodel of her bathroom. We actually enjoy doing projects like these together. She helped me put up a giant space mural in Ian’s room and it was truly a joy. She finds cool clothes and stuff for my kids at the thrift store or on eBay. My kids love her dog - a somewhat hyper 2-1/2 year old golden retriever. My folks like her. My friends like her. She fell in love with my church after a few weeks and after proclaiming that church was not going to be a thing we shared in our relationship. I really like her kids. Her older son is cool and aloof, but underneath the veneer, he’s clearly a compassionate and very intelligent young man with his values in the right place. Her younger son, the one with Fragile X, was initially, honestly, rather frightening to me. Not that I’m inclined to judge people. A few of his behaviors were troublesome at first glance. As we’ve gotten to know one another better, we get along really well and can laugh and feel comfortable together (including morning cuddles sometimes when I get a sleepover there - all 150ish pounds of him!).

What’s occurred to me recently is that Christine is the person I’ve been looking for for a long time. I’m very much an environmentalist and an acoustic musician and feel connected to the earth. I generally believe in the worth and dignity of people and that we have the power to change the world for the better. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and had these senses routinely drummed out of me for years. When I got to college, the folks I gravitated towards and became good friends with were the hippies and the radicals and the tree huggers and the dirt worshippers. Yeah, there were some nutballs in that crowd, but many of us worked at the food co-op, wrote and sang songs about environmentalism and social justice, actually worked for a better environment and social justice and believed in a better world that was inhabited by real people living real lives and thinking for themselves rather than what they were told by their corporate overlords. Of the women I dated in college, the person with the most lasting impact on my psyche was Paula, a naturalist, a musician, and an atheist who attended Catholic mass every week. She was my first love as an adult and she helped me start finding the person I wanted to become, despite my suburban, materialistic upbringing.

Christine thinks for herself. She grew up in small-town Minnesota until 11 and then small-town Indiana. She spent four years prostrate to the higher mind (at a well-respected Quaker liberal arts college), got her paper, and she was free. She worked in education, first in Head Start and then with special needs kids. She left the workforce to raise her kids. When she got divorced 5 years ago, she just wanted to work outdoors, in nature To be with plants and flowers. It’s her first love. It’s probably genetic - her brother is a succesful nature artist in Michigan. So she works at a greenhouse and really enjoys it. At least she enjoys digging in the dirt and planting and watering and hauling mulch with the skid loader. She could live without some of her freaky religious co-workers and could stand to make a few more bucks. She unapologetically loves gardening and kids and baking and decorating and Martha Stewart and craft projects and music. I told her she’s “radically domestic”.

I’ve tried to break up with Christine several times now. Every time I’ve looked it in the eye, though, it’s been my own shit. Some of it is grief and shock and adjustment. Some of it is my propensity (as Robert A. Johnson discusses) to manufacture a mythical woman, a composite of all of the positive aspects of various women in my life I admire and respect and then to compare Christine to that myth. It’s folly, of course, but I do it. Luckilly, I’m now at the point where I catch myself doing this before I’m inclined to take action. I feel like the 7 month journey of ours has been a promethean gift. Thankfully, I’ve only singed my hair and Christine has been like a human fire extinguisher. In the words of Paul Simon, “I was a crazy motion ’til you calmed me down. Took a little time to calm me down”. When I look at Christine as a human being and as a thinking person in this world increasingly lacking in sanity, I see someone who has very strong, very compassionate values and has made life choices consistent with these values. This is a person I’d be much, much poorer not to have permanently in my life. Likewise for my kids.

Let me not put her on a pedestal. And let me not lead you into thinking I’m somehow blind to her weaknesses in a desperate rush to piece my life back together. Like any one of us, she’s a human being with plenty of shortcomings and room to grow. I still have more to learn about her. Her older son has two more years of high school left. So she’s going to spend at least those two years in her town (ideally having her son living with her - he lives with his dad right now) and I in mine. This will give us time to move forward gracefully and have a very solid foundation down when we decide to make our separate lives one.

Oh, and amusingly, her profile on match.com explicitly stated that she was looking for someone who did not have full-time kids or whose kids were mostly or completely out of the house. Adjusting to the idea of helping raise young kids has taken some time for her. Thankfully, my kids have mostly charmed the socks off of her. Yeah, she’s seen them bicker plenty (something she had no experience with, having one of her sons developmentally uninclined to bicker). But she has told me she now really loves the idea of helping raise my kids, especially since two of them are girls, a chance she thought she’d lost out on.

So, yeah, evenings are spent on the phone. And doing a lot more dishes and laundry and pickup than I used to. Why? Because I had to fire my nanny/babysitter of almost 2 years. Why? Because she managed to steal almost ten thousand dollars from me. Sittergate ‘08. We hired her before Anna died so we could have more time with one another and with the kids, knowing that Anna’s time was likely short. We issued her a credit card in her name so she could do things like grocery shop and such. I pay my credit card off every month. Adjusting to single parenting, and knowing that all the charges are mine, I didn’t necessarily scour my statement every month. I started going more and more over budget. I finally dug into my statements and found she had been using my card to buy herself all kinds lovely things from stores I never have set foot in. Renting cars for the weekend, hitting the bars, etc. I probably can’t mention much more than that, but I am being repaid and do have some recourse in that arena.

So I’ve hired two other college students to come in a few days a week and help and I have a lovely woman who does deep cleaning and I bumped her hours up some. But I’m having to do more work around the house and shop more and stuff - stuff I should rightly be doing anyway. And I certainly don’t mind it. I’m a bit of a control freak, I suppose, so I’m glad to be doing more stuff around the house, because it’s being done the RIGHT way, i.e. my way And I’m saving money having less help and doing my own shopping. I’m also baking my own bread and trying to take more control of my food supply in general. I’m going to join our CSA this summer after lapsing last year for the first time in ten years. Having the luxury of access to a greenhouse, Christine and I are starting some tomatoes and peppers next week. I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” - a family’s journal of trying to spend a year eating what the grow or can obtain locally. In a cool twist of serendipity and small world, the book was a gift from my good musician friend Michael, former band member of Carrie Newcomer, friend of the author. The book sat on my shelf from Christmas until a month or so ago when K, one of my two awesome new babysitters strongly implored me to read it, having grown up in the same town as the author’s farm and being friends with the daughter, co-author of the book. It’s just gotta be my destiny as I get closer and closer to slow food, thankful for the companionship of my sweetheart, a sympathetic accomplice.

The one who survives by making the lives
Of others worthwhile
She’s coming apart
Right before my eyes
The one who depends on the services she renders
To those who come knocking
She’s seeing too clearly what she can’t be
What understanding defies

She says I need not to need
Or else a love with intuition
Someone who reaches out to my weakness and won’t let go
I need not to need
I’ve always been the tower
But now I feel like I’m the flower trying to bloom in snow

She turns out the light anticipating night falling
Tenderly around her
And watches the dusk
The words won’t come
She carries the act so convincingly the fact is
Sometimes she believes it
That she can be happy the way things are
Be happy with the things she’s done

And now I need not to need
Or else a love with intuition
Someone who reaches out to my weakness and won’t let go
I need not to need
I’ve always been the tower
But now I feel like I’m the flower trying to bloom in snow

Reach out
But hold back
Where is safety
Reach out
And hold back
Where is the one who can change me
Where is the one
The one

Reach out
But hold back
Where is safety
Reach out
And hold back
Where is the one who can save me
Where is the one
The one

I need not to need
Or else a love with intuition
Someone who reaches out to my weakness and won’t let go
I need not to need
I’ve always been the tower
But now I feel like I’m the flower trying to bloom in snow

I feel like I’m the flower trying to bloom in snow
The danger and the power
The friend and the foe

But that New Year’s dance left me with the embryonic hope that maybe, in some way, I would be able to love someone again.

We had that talk when Anna was sick. She wanted me to find someone else and to be happy. I told her I wasn’t interested. That I was planning on her being around for a long time. I was. I had to have that hope. And I did. There were people that lived more than 5 years after a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer. Anna could be one of them. My friend and neighbor, Alan, lost his wife about 6 months before I did. She told him to grieve for a year and then remarry. Anna wasn’t quite so specific with her directive. But I think I understand. If I were the one to be going, I would definitely want her to remarry if it was what she wanted.

I’m now at the point where, occasionally, I can imagine spending my time with someone else. What I can’t possibly imagine is someone else being a step-parent to my kids. One of the driving forces in my life has been the very unpleasant relationship I’ve had with my stepmother. She’s a very unhealthy woman who has seen her share of suffering but has never faced it head-on. Thus, she was pretty efficient at passing that suffering on to my brother and to me (and to my dad) growing up. My mom’s second husband was also an angry, violent man. He treated us all - my mom, my brother, my stepsisters, even my Dad - very poorly.

I told myself that when I got married, I would never divorce. I would do whatever it took to make the relationship successful so that my kids would not have to go through what I went through growing up in terms of stepparents. Now, without having chosen it, I have the Faustian bargain of potentially trading the companionship of another friend, partner, lover, confidant, dreamer, see-er of visions, traveler, and sufferer for the risk of my kids living through my former hell. Yes, I understand that it’s much more complicated than that and there are a million reasons why things were the way they were in my family of origin. But that’s the bargain my monkey mind faces anyway.

So, despite all that, I decided to throw caution to the wind and at least dip my toe in the waters of dating. Being a netizen since the days of 300 baud modems and dialing long distance from Allston, MA to San Francisco to find good conversations on The WELL, it only made sense to check out online personals.

I don’t know how many of you have seen these, but let me tell you, it’s quite an experience. I wanted to see who was out there, but you really can’t do much lurking without setting up your own profile. So I put one up on Yahoo! Personals, just a few words to get started. The way these things work is you enter your gender and zipcode and you specify your potential mate’s age range (I went with 32-42), gender (I went with female - I’m curious about, but probably not looking to get serious with men), and you’re presented with a list of possible matches. Everyone provides a tagline or headline and then some verbiage about themselves. They also specify biographical stuff like never married/divorced/widowed, how many kids, education level, smoking/drinking preferences, etc. And they normally upload a few photos.

After reading through a few hundred of these profiles now, let me tell you - it’s a hell of an insight into the human condition. First, most people can’t write a coherent sentence to save their souls. Not that we all have to be Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Thordora, but geez. And can someone please point more than half of these folks to a spell checker? Now, my wife was dyslexic and several other people I love dearly have mild to severe dyslexia. So you can’t judge someone on their spelling. But if you’re going to try to attract the best person out there, wouldn’t you run your profile by someone you trust? And wouldn’t you spend more than 10 minutes writing it?

And then there are the pictures. Some of the pictures are so blurry or dark it’s impossible to tell what the person looks like or they’re sort of frowning or they have their ex-husband’s arm still around them. And this is not just a few. My photos aren’t winning any awards, but they’re at least not underexposed. So once you rule out the half that smoke, then the half of those that are unintelligible, then the half of those that are inscrutable, then the half of those that are trite (I mean who the heck doesn’t like long walks on the beach at sunset and cuddling by the fireplace?), then the half of those that listen to country music and what are you left with? Pretty much squat.

I’ve found exactly one profile on Yahoo! Personals that makes me inclined to put finger to keyboard and make contact. Someone who seems to know how shine some light on the prism of her self and to radiate some of the resultant color to her profile. But she smokes. For me, that’s a deal killer. I lost one beautiful soul through lung cancer and couldn’t do it again.

I’ve found that if I widen the distance of my search, I can find all sorts of potentially interesting people in Indianapolis and Chicago, but I’m not leaving this area and I wouldn’t expect anyone else to relocate. Not to mention, how the heck would you date someone 60+ miles away when you have about 4 free hours a week? Yeah, there’s that whole interwebs thing, but, well, Indy is just too far.

So then I decided to check out match.com. I had seen ads and wondered if it maybe attracted people who were more, perhaps, dedicated to actually finding a date? I had put together a decent profile on Yahoo! by this time and copied it over to match.com (where you get to add a few more blurbs). It’s really about the same, as far as I can tell. The site’s more user-friendly, so that helps. And you can do reverse and mutual matches (i.e. you meet their criteria and/or you both meet each other’s criteria). So that saves time and the effort of looking through dozens of NASCAR fans.

I found one profile on match.com pretty quickly that was rather intriguing. Her headline was a Jack Kerouac quote I’d always liked about living a passionate life. She likes The Grateful Dead and Tom Robbins and Van Morrison (all big, big faves of mine). She has a young daughter she’s very dedicated to. She’s an english teacher. The Kerouac alone probably would have been enough. So I wrote to her, putting my best foot forward. She wrote a relatively short, but pleasant reply. I suggested we IM or get coffee or whatever she was comfortable with. This was almost 2 weeks ago and I never heard back. I suspect I won’t at this point.

The last few weeks have found me at relatively low tide on grief beach. But I did find myself stopping a couple days ago and just staring at a picture of Anna in the hall. One we had done with my dad and brother and all of our families in matching white polo shirts. She looked so gorgeous in her bushy red hair against that white shirt. And I remembered so many plans and so many dreams. And I realized that I’m really probably not ready for dating at this point. I think the online personals may have been a bit of a shiney thing. I do miss having someone to kiss on the neck, right between their jawbone and their ear. And I do miss having someone with whom I can share the joy and rage of the day. And I do miss having someone to fuel the fire of my ideas and fueling their fire too. And I do miss looking into someone’s eyes and making that instantaneous, deep, real connection that says “we were thrust here, unwilling, unwilled, and unprepared, but let us face it all together because it’s sure as hell better than facing it alone”. But I think the time is not yet.

When we got to TKD, I was upstairs in the changing room and the fear jumped out like a rabid dog and demanded my attention. I decided it would be foolish to ignore something about my heart, especially being my kids’ only living parent. I called the babysitter and arranged to have her pick Alyssa up after TKD and headed to the E.R.

When Anna first got her cancer diagnosis, I had a panic attack the weekend after and thought it was a heart attack. It wasn’t, thankfully. The nice thing about heart problems and the E.R. is that you get a golden ticket right in the door. Having spent 17 months in hospitals and doctor’s offices with Anna, I was depressed and scared to be back in one. You get kinda used to it at the time, but having been away from the medical establishment, more or less, for 6 months, I hadn’t missed it a bit.

There I sat on a gurney in the E.R. They hooked me up to an EKG and took an X-Ray and took blood and I just sat. And sat and sat. My blood pressure when I came in was high - 170 over 120. So I watched the machine, glad to see it dropping as I sat and waited. Just sitting there with my thoughts for 3 hours, I had a bit of an epiphany.

I had gotten myself into a pattern of staying up late goofing off. I loves me my alone time. Playing guitar, reading, watching TV, reading blogs, writing in my blog, whatever shiney thing crosses my path. So I was getting to bed at 1am the previous 10 days or so. And since I have to be up no later than 7:30 to get the kids to school and daycare on time, I was really building up a sleep deficit. On top of that, with Anna’s birthday and 6 month anniversary the week before, I wasn’t sleeping too well when I was actually down for the night.

About those shiney things. Following the next shiny thing that crosses my path is the story of my life. I have ADHD. It can be a blessing at times (like when I write software), but mostly, it’s a curse. Especially now, trying to raise kids on my own. Anna helped me re-remember that I have it. I got an official diagnosis a few years ago. So I sat there with my thoughts and realized that my ADHD was going to kill me via a heart attack via sleep deprivation if I didn’t do something about it. My therapist, Cricket, told me years ago that being a morning person or a night person is just part of your nature and is very difficult to change. Interestingly, I had had coffee with my friend Alan that morning (a friend of Cricket’s, actually), and he suggested that it’s much more malleable than that. I decided, sitting there on the gurney, that I would become a morning person. That I would start living like my dad, with order and discipline. That I would, at 37 years old, finally become a grownup.

Now, the mind of someone with ADHD is full of grandiose plans. The irony was that this was just another grand plan. (plus a bargain with myself in order to stay alive until Emma turns 18). Luckily, I still had several hours of wait ahead of me, so I figured out a way to actually turn my plan into concrete reality. It was time to make some real changes in my schedule and in my mind:

• Go to bed when the kids go to bed. Shower after Alyssa is down at 9pm and be in bed by 9:30, reading until 9:45.
• No laptop at night. Looking into a bright light right before sleep is dumb.
• Step #3: Stop focusing on stupid shit like learning how to weld and build crazy bicycles. Occupy my mind with more important shit like when Alyssa’s Girl Scout sleepover is and where I can get a decent Batman costume for Ian for the stars he’s earned.
• No more coffee. Decaf or tea in moderation.
• Wake up at 6am or so and Get Things Done.
• Let go of the idea that I’m going to be the next Martin Sexton or Iron Chef. I suppose this is obvious, but some little part of my brain hadn’t done this yet. I have dozens of songs I want to record with my new Christmas present. It’ll all have to wait.
• Sadly, dear readers, give up the idea that I’m able to blog and read blogs as much as I might like. I don’t really put blogging or reading my friend’s blogs in the shiney things category (in other words, I really do see staying in touch with people this way as worthwhile), but it can be time consuming.

The doc came in and told me my heart is totally fine. That I need to keep losing weight (I’ve actually lost about 8 pounds since MLK day, thanks in part to SparkPeople - Thanks again for the tip, Kat). That what I had was probably PVCs and there’s no link to fatality with those whatsoever. That if I had something more serious, there would be signs. The PVCs are often linked to too much caffeine and too much stress (and, I surmised, too little sleep).

So I’m doing all those things above. I’ve been early to bed and early to rise nearly every day since that night. It’s glorious to be mostly caught up on sleep again. It’s quite nice to be up early and see the sun rise. I’ve always liked this, actually. Now, it’s a regular occurrence. No, I haven’t picked up my guitar for more than 5 minutes in the last week and a half. No, I’m not blogging as much as I’d like. No, I haven’t watched Iron Chef or Good Eats in that week and a half. But I do have my next actions list current and I do feel good and I’m much less tempted to overeat now that I’m not sleep deprived. I’m much more focused on parenting being my shiney thing for the next, oh, 20 years. 3 hours alone with my thoughts in a hospital gown and no computer or anything to be shiney was an unexpected gift.

Having more sleep helps keep my ADHD in check to a decent extent. But it’s still there. And I do still get tired of so much soup and garbage can. I made a deal with myself there in the E.R. that if I don’t get my shit together by March 1, I’m going to treat my ADHD. My shit is now much more together and hopefully keeping it together isn’t just another shiney thing itself and it will stick. If not, I may consider ritalin or strattera. I’m considering it anyway. In a classic ADHD move, I ordered the book “Scattered,” only to find I’ve read it already (and can’t find my copy). But it’s a worthy re-read.

People have told me I’m doing such a great job raising my kids by myself. I’ve always appreciated the compliment. And, in a lot of objective ways, I am doing pretty well. Before the holidays, I was managing our family better. But I never felt like I really was doing the right thing in my heart. I’m getting there now. Sometime in the future, I may take the compliment and even believe it in my heart of hearts.

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• Morrissey’s new CD - I Just Want to See the Boy Happy. Sure, who didn’t like The Smiths’ How Soon Is Now in college? But I’m a bit too straight to be a big Morrissey fan. Maybe it’s the fact that now that one of my oldest and dearest guy friends is a woman and I’ve put a great deal of thought into gender and even my own sexuality lately. Maybe it’s just that slightly whiny depressing music (albeit with a good beat and crunchy guitars) is a good grief soundtrack. Whatever it is, his new CD sounded great to me when I listened to it at work this week.
• Matisyahu’s Jerusalem. Hard to take a Pennsylvanian, former jamband junkie seriously as a big star singing Jamaican music, but it’s a really catchy tune. And I suppose Rasta and Judaism are, very roughly, cousins. I have a problem with people faking accents in their music. It seems to be the norm, whether it’s “metal accent”, a la Nickelback or “fakey urban, slightly latino, slightly african-american accent”, a la Fergie, but it’s weird to me. I prefer someone like Billy Bragg who has the same accent when he talks and sings. Why try to sound like you have a Jamaican accent in your music when you sound like an upper-middle class jewish guy in interviews? Nonetheless, it’s good reggae. And on the slightly humorous front, I can’t help but singing “Jerusalem, if I forget you, fire not gonna come from me bum.” - a line I misheard the first time
• Way too much Justin Timberlake for a healthy mind. My Love and SexyBack have been in heavy rotation in the Dufair household. I even looked online for a karaoke version of SexyBack this week to try and record Bringing Messy Back in my spare time. I’m neurotic. Didn’t find much. Luckilly, the JT meme has peaked in my head, I think.

On the not so guilty front (aside from the guilt of playing it for my kids with pretty inappropriate lyrics), I ran across Le Disko by Shiny Toy Guns on Q101 in Chicago while doing some last minute holiday shopping and it jumped out of the radio at me. Tasty electronica/dance/pop with lots of stops and changes and other things to keep an ADHD mind very happy. Reminds me a bit of Hardknox in it’s bratty, overconfident, sexually charged way.

On the not so guilty and quite excellent front, I played Martin Sexton’s Black Sheep today while cleaning house and it was, as it always is with Martin, my favorite Bostonian singer/songwriter, a religious experience. Serendipitously, Karrie posted about Black Sheep (the old skool rap group) today, which prompted me to find a copy of Sexton’s Black Sheep. Found this on YouTube and it’s pretty tasty:

Gifts from karriew

Gifts from venessa

I’m just now getting caught up from the Christmas Tour 2006, unpacking, taking down the Christmas tree, putting away the decorations, going through the boxes and bags of gifts and even trying to get some time with my new toy. Loyal readers know I do love me my Rhapsody. With my new toy, I think I’ve finally reached Rhapsody nirvana. At least until it’s on my cell phone and I can stream whatever from wherever. And thordora, I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying The Decemberists now that I’m listening to them on headphones.

But that’s not what I intended to write about tonight (this morning, actually). We had the fortune of coming home to not just one, but two packages from my swell friends from the blogosphere, karriew and venessa, replete with cool weird ugly stuffed creatures, sushi kits, brio train pieces, Jelly Bellies, and even Pocky. It’s pretty humbling that people with busy lives and kids and school and marriages that take a lot of work and unmet personal goals would do this for us. Thank you both (and jen, again) for thinking of my kids and of me during our first holiday without Anna. Our friends and family made what could have been a treacherous season into one of love and support as we continue to grieve.